Once upon a time businesses used to print flyers, take out ads in newspapers and rush to their nearest radio stations when it came to advertising their product. While many still do engage in these forms of advertising, many don’t as they now put their budget into ads on digital channels. One of these is Twitter.

If you’re thinking of putting some spend into an ad campaign on the world’s best-known microblogging platform but you’re unsure what way to go about it, here are seven tips…

1. Know your objective

Before you begin your campaign, you need to know why you’re starting it. If you’re new to Twitter, you might want to grow your following. If you’ve got a particular message you want communicated, a promoted tweet might be the way forward. If it’s traffic you’re after, you’ll need to set up a campaign that drives people to your website. Whatever your objective, make sure you choose it wisely.

2. Select your audience wisely

The objective for your campaign will play a huge part in what audience you create. If you’re looking at reaching new markets, you will choose Twitter users in those regions. If you’re looking to increase your female customer base, this is where you determine that.

As well as gender and location, here you can target people who follow other accounts and/or who have certain interests or behaviours. If you’ve a large email database, you can upload your list here too to see if they’re on Twitter.

3. Know your budget and the right way to spend it

The next step when creating your campaign is budgeting. Here you will need to enter a maximum daily spend and an optional lifetime spend.

There are two main things to watch out for here:

1) Budget: Twitter advertising can be significantly more expensive than Facebook advertising. That said, it’s still worth advertising there because it’s where your customers are.

2) Pricing: Here you’re presented with three options – Automatic Bid, Target Bid and Maximum Bid. The safest option here is Automatic Bid. This is where you let Twitter do your bidding for you. Since it’s in their interest to give you your best return for your investment, it’s the option I recommend going with. The ‘Target Bid’ option allows Twitter to optimise your bids to help achieve that target cost. With ‘Maximum Bid’ you can enter exactly how much a follower is worth to you – Twitter won’t go over this figure.

4. Think carefully about the copy (for promoted tweets)

Something that is very difficult on social media these days is breaking through the noise. Since so many businesses are on Twitter, having your tweets stand out from the crowd can be hard. When writing the copy for the tweet, stop and think to yourself ‘Will this grab somebody’s attention?’. If it won’t, change the text. It’s that simple. Things that will make your tweet stand out are call to actions, discount codes and something that makes your business unique.

5. Think even more carefully about the imagery

Once upon a time hashtags were what drove engagement for your tweets. But things have changed… now it’s images that draw most attention to tweets. This is because tweets with images earn far more real estate in users’ feeds than those that don’t. So when creating your campaign have images that stand out.

The internet allows a very powerful way of testing things via a method known as ‘AB Testing’. This entails splitting a similar audience into two or more different groups, presenting them with similar ads to see what ones perform the best. Then once you know what ads are performing the best, you pause/cancel those ads that aren’t performing.

Twitter recommends you creating between 3-4 tweets per campaign, so make sure you do as they suggest. All it takes is composing the same tweet different ways.

7. Monitor the campaign for the best performance

Arguably the best thing about advertising on the internet is that, unlike more traditional ways of advertising, you can edit your ad/campaign in real time. So if you see that people are engaging with the ads on smartphones and not desktop, you simply pause the desktop ads in the campaign.

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Colm is Founder and Managing Director of digital marketing agency Sixtwo Digital. After running Hostelworld.com’s content and social media for almost 11 years he felt it was time to branch out on his own, using all his experience to educate others in the travel space.